From the Foreword This Concordance of the Qur'an in English satisfies a paramount need of those—and there are millions of them—who have no command of the Arabic language and yet desire to understand the Qur'an. The benefit derivable from English translations of the Sacred Book is, in principle, limited because, first, the Qur'an is not a "book" but a collection of passages revealed to Muhammad over a period of about twenty-three years and, second, because the Qur'an is not really translatable. This does not mean that the Qur'an should not be translated. It does mean that translations lose much in tone and nuance, let alone the incommunicable beauty, grandeur, and grace of the original. . . . The main distinction of Hana Kassis's concordance, in my view, is that it utilizes the semantic structure of Arabic vocabulary itself in revealing the meaning of the Qur'an on any given issue, point or concept. A reader who looks in the index of this concordance for a word which he has encountered in reading an English translation of the Qur'an—the word pride, for example—is directed immediately to the roots of the Arabic, Qur'anic terms for pride. At tne entries for these Arabic roots, all the derivative forms are shown, and the verses of the Qur'an in which they appear are there listed in translation. . . . I am confident that any person who is sincerely interested in understanding the Qur'an and appreciating the nuances of its diction and shades of its meaning can satisfy his need more fully with this book than in any way short of developing a real command over the Arabic language itself. —Fazlur Rahman, Professor of Islamic Thought, University of Chicago

Vols. for 1980- issued in three parts: Series, Authors, and Titles.

The feeling that Islamic literature deserves and requires an Islamic classification dcheme has been met with a widespread dissatisfaction among information scientists in the Muslim world. However, indexing the classical Qur'anic exegeses and Hadith collections still requires an initial operation list of both subject headings of both Qur'anic and Hadith texts. The book is based on an investigation of the terminology in the Qur'anic text for the purpose of designing a retrieval system. It makes use of conceptual verses and words as partial examples for the required task. These examples are used to test the factors affecting the design at both the documentary and computation levels. At the documentary level, the examples are used to examine the effects of Qur'anic terminology on the commentators and to see how it affects the performance of the retrieval system. It also examines the characteristics of the Qur'anic vocabulary, against the problems known to be encountered in constructing an efficient retrieval system. On the computation level, the examples are used to examine the possibility of the Qur'an in its stylistic form being processed by the computer. as a result, the study offers guidelines and recommendations with two examples for the natural and social sciences as a model for constructing a retrieval system for Qur'anic text.

This text is an introduction to the full range of standard reference tools in all branches of English studies. More than 10,000 titles are included. The Reference Guide covers all the areas traditionally defined as English studies and all the field of inquiry more recently associated with English studies. British and Irish, American and world literatures written in English are included. Other fields covered are folklore, film, literary theory, general and comparative literature, language and linguistics, rhetoric and composition, bibliography and textual criticism and women's studies.

This volume is a collection of papers from the 1st International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology at the University of Leicester in 2002. The purpose of the conference was to bring together scholars and academics from around the world working as scholars and editors on historical dictionaries or as practising lexicographers. The papers are, accordingly, arranged in two sections, reflecting the distinction between those individuals working on the historical development of dictionaries and those considering the lexicological problems and challenges facing the lexicographer in attempting to represent as fully and justly as possible historical forms of the English language.